Paris ? France’s presidential election today is a ground-breaker – a choice between an immigrant’s son and an army officer’s daughter, each offering a radically different vision of how to put a dispirited nation back on track.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal are both mavericks who changed the rules of French politics and energized an electorate hungry for change. Their rise marks a generational shift, because whoever wins will be the nation’s first president born after World War II.

Of three final polls, taken Wednesday and Thursday, one put them even and two gave Sarkozy the lead.

Sarkozy, a conservative, wants to free up labor markets, make the French work longer hours and whip them into shape. Royal is the Socialist Party candidate who would save France’s generous welfare system from the lash of Sarkozy’s “neoconservative ideology.”

Both have ideas for restoring national self-confidence, which lately has been battered by economic decline, unrest in France’s immigrant slums and shrinking clout in the new, united Europe that France once sought to lead.

Unemployment is stuck above 8 percent, and the economy has stagnated at about 1.5 percent annual growth in the past five years. Youths in housing projects burned cars for three weeks in 2005, awakening France to the problem of a deeply discontented immigrant underclass.

Rioting flared again in March last year, this time against an effort to loosen hiring-and-firing rules in the labor market.

Turnout in the April 22 first-round vote was a high 84 percent. And the two candidates, nicknamed Sarko and Sego, exemplify the feeling that a turning point has been reached.